The main theme of Buddhism,” the Dalai Lama began, “is altruism based on compassion and love.” He then went on to teach the foundational Tibetan Buddhist practice of “mother recognition”: imagining all beings as one’s mother.

Again, in order to have a sense of closeness and dearness for others,

you must first train in a sense of their kindness through using as a

model a person in this lifetime who was very kind to yourself and

then extending this sense of gratitude to all beings. Since, in

general, in this life your mother was the closest and offered the most

help, the process of meditation begins with recognizing all other

sentient beings as like your mother.

I remember talking with another Tibetan lama, years later, about how difficult it is for some Westerners to engage with this idea because of how conflicted they are about their own

mothers. “For those people,” the lama said, smiling, “I always say think about your grandmother instead.” He would have approved of my new friend Zeki’s ayahuasca memories!

This is mother recognition from the other side. Not only have all beings been our mothers but we are also mothers to all beings: the womb of compassion is there within us waiting to be rediscovered. When we realize how readily we have misconstrued ourselves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs of how limited, isolated, and alone we are, when we touch the ground of being, we come home.

In life we seek like-minded people despite—or because of—the limit of knowing and understanding. We do so to feel less lonely, though it brings a different kind of loneliness. In seeking others, inevitably we try to control an interaction. We insist on being known only as the version we prefer to attach to ourselves. A narrative catering to others is not far from memories revised for ourselves: both move us away from the quicksand of feelings. And those who do know us beyond our chosen version—by proximity, by intuition, by observation—must provoke similar discomfort in us as melodrama does. Does our wariness of melodrama contribute to our wish to escape their eyes, or is it the other way around, that in avoiding meeting those who have more access to our interior world than we are willing to allow, we can feel momentarily protected from our own memories?

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents’ memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory’s melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.